


love or death

by charizona



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: (and Sameen feels), F/F, Torture, just some Sameen thoughts, post 4x21
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-30
Updated: 2015-04-30
Packaged: 2018-03-26 10:08:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3846904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charizona/pseuds/charizona
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Root loves her, she tells them, mostly because she knows it to be true. She tells them about the cochlear implant, about the direct contact with the Machine. Root loves her, she tells them, but Root loves the Machine. Maybe Root loves the Machine more than she loves Shaw. Honestly, Shaw says to Martine once, it’s a toss up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	love or death

**Author's Note:**

> After the episode, I started writing and I didn't stop until I was almost asleep. Today, I edited it. This was the result. This has never happened to me before. (Goodbye Martine my sweet summer child).

She stares, stares, stares out the window because the snow falls in sheets.

Well. Not quite sheets, more like blankets. Thick, white blankets of cold ice that have only touched the outside of Shaw’s boots and never her fingers. She wishes for her fingertips, sometimes.

Staring out the window, she’s not quite sure if regret is an option. Feelings are twisting in her veins, like the snow icing the fine twigs sticking from the branches, and regret figures itself deep in her bones anyway, whether she wants it to or not. She regrets telling, she regrets breaking, she regrets falling.

She let them break her. She let Martine break her.

Sometimes, it feels as though her and Martine are old friends by now.

Friendship falls in the form of fractals, vision breaking. She breaks herself, shatters underneath Martine’s hands over and over and over because it’s like holding hands. Except her fingers are broken. Her wounds are split. Martine smiles at her and Shaw smiles back crimson and bloody, the thick syrup of it dripping down her chin. This is friendship, a closeness that is known with the hours spent locked in a room with another.

Martine sits next to her on the bed sometimes, on those nights when Shaw is quiet as opposed to loud, and she doesn’t say much at all. Friendship falls best when no words can be said, but both know what the other means. Shaw knows what Martine means - what Martine wants - when the gunshot wound in her stomach is reopened again and again because Martine asks for it.

Eventually, Shaw gives it to her. It’s a friendship, after all.

But does friendship come before love? Shaw doesn’t quite know, even when the love she doesn’t dare show seems to split fleetingly through her fingers at the oddest times. There’s no control over a love like this one, over a woman like that one.

A woman like Root.

Martine knows this. She digs deep into the metaphorical wound like she’s seen the tapes (most likely she has, if they exist) and Shaw regrets this friendship most of all. Broken fingers, broken veins, broken heart - Shaw shudders underneath the touch of a once-upon-a-time agent and tells her everything. It’s the least she can do for a friend.

Shaw tells her everything, repeats her words for John Greer because he asks, but she doesn’t tell them locations. She lies and says she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know where Harold Finch is hiding, she doesn’t know where Samantha Groves (it’s Root, it’s always been Root) keeps the Machine. She doesn’t even know where the dog is.

Of course, she doesn’t tell them that there even is a dog. The dog is irrelevant. They don’t care about the dog. Once upon a time, Shaw was only in it for the dog.

Do friends tell friends they have dogs? Shaw wonders if Martine has a dog when Martine threatens to break all of her toes, too.

Shaw almost counters with cutting all of Martine’s hair off, has been thinking about it since it jaded into the darker shade it currently is, but friends don’t tell friends what they’re really thinking. Friends don’t shatter the illusion of a new dye that works, when it really doesn’t. So Shaw doesn’t say a word. With a broken wrist, three broken fingers, and splintered veins up her forearms, Shaw is getting better at friendship.

Love, not so much. Everything she knows about Root spills from her her like liquid, rushing from her lips almost as quick as a kiss in a blue elevator.

(Almost, because Shaw hesitates when lips press against lips. The sensation isn’t what she’s expecting, Root’s desperation filling her to the brim. It’s overwhelming, quite frankly, and it’s all she can do to push a tall, tall woman away from her).

Root loves her, she tells them, mostly because she knows it to be true. She tells them about the cochlear implant, about the direct contact with the Machine. Root loves her, she tells them, but Root loves the Machine. Maybe Root loves the Machine more than she loves Shaw. Honestly, Shaw says to Martine once, it’s a toss up.

One day, Martine asks her if she loves back. Not Root, not the name. Just if she loves. That’s it.

Shaw breathes, in and out. She doesn’t know.

“I did,” she says, because she thinks so. The ‘not anymore’ is unspoken to her new friend, but it doesn’t apply. Martine fills in the blanks, but the blanks are untrue. If Shaw were to fill in the blanks, they would look more like a mad lib compared to the way she’s lived her life up until recently. But Shaw’s fingers are broken and bent and bruised; she couldn’t hold a pencil if she wanted to.

The next day, Martine asks her if she loved Root back.

“Maybe,” she says, because she thinks so. The hole in her chest is different, and maybe a bullet tore through it, and maybe a shovel pierced her sternum and pushed everything out, but there is the gasoline in the back of her throat ignites when she thinks about Root.

But Shaw’s had years of practice. Years, months, days of not feeling, and Shaw doesn’t react when Martine - her new _friend_ \- says some rather crude things about her old ones. Shaw swallows and sighs and breathes through the pain of her broken bones. She’s never had this many broken at once, wonders what it would look like on a x-ray. She tunes out Martine.

Martine blows away like dust. Shaw’s alone again with her thoughts, her feelings, and her pain.

Sometimes, it’s enough.

The bones in her hand heal like helicopters, ragged and slow, but striking nonetheless. Martine lets them heal this time and Shaw reconsiders their friendship. She sits on a windowsill. She reads a magazine. She lies in bed. Shaw wraps herself in the thin, worn sheets of the room because it’s the only thing she can think of left to do.

But she’s pushed out one night. Ushered into a car and onto somewhere new. If her hands were even useful, she might try to run away from her new friends, but there’s the beginnings of a plan forming in the back of her mind and it requires the full use of her metacarpals. She’ll have to wait, for now.

Snowflakes fall. Some catch the windshield wipers of the SUV. They even let her sit in the passenger seat.

On the wind, there’s the whisper of a voice she recognizes, but Shaw can’t be bothered to listen. She’s not in the mood. Not right now (maybe not ever).

Martine doesn’t join them. Sometimes, Shaw finds herself missing her companion, the person she’s gotten to know so well through the way she bends Shaw’s fingers back with little to no mercy, or the way she digs the barrel of a gun into a bullet wound. Shaw’s stomach aches at the thought. She’s never been one for dulling pain, but Martine makes her throb with hatred, a feeling associated with friendship.

She’ll be good. She will.

(And then Martine will be hers).

They don't bother with the drugs anymore, but the constant stream of vitamins in her blood screams through her unnecessarily; those pills have always been useless. She never sees the sun. Vitamin D comes through the compact pill they force down her throat despite the fact she tells Martine over and over again that she doesn't need it.

"You do," Martine says, but she isn't listening to Shaw.

This time, the guard behind the wheel hands her a handful of pills and Shaw takes them without complaint. They slide down her throat like sand. They're bitter. Heavy. Thick like the blood she’s used to tasting after her visits with Martine. Friends leave friends bruised and bloody; it's the closest thing to friendship Shaw has ever known.

(That's another lie she tells them.

She has a friend who wears glasses and admonishes her for her bluntness. Once upon a time, Harold Finch was a man without a life, but now Harold Finch is a man with a dog, a man who gave her a job, and a man who has given her a home.

She has a friend who is almost a foot taller than her. He never mentions it, but she knows this and hates every moment she spends standing next to him because she's tiny and she's never hated being tiny before she met him. Before she met him, she glowered at the tall world. But John Reese, she glares at him in the most lighthearted way she can muster.

She has a friend with a badge. She never thought she would have a friend with a badge. Once upon a time, she had two.

The lies leave her lips in sheets kind of like the snow outside the window. When the guard behind the wheel asks her if she's comfortable, she says she's fine.

For the first time in her life, Shaw thinks it would be easier if she were dead.)

Sitting in a car going nowhere, Shaw lets herself think of everything. She thinks about Root, she thinks about Reese, and she thinks about the Machine and all of its flaws.

Sometimes, she thinks the Machine is perfect, like any robot should be, but it is, after all, a machine. It malfunctions like any other, like Shaw’s phone does when she drops it (when she drops from a second story window), and something like this was bound to happen. It’s in Shaws hands now, their fate. She’s doing this all for them. Their safety. Hers. Root’s. The Machine’s, even, because at times Shaw can’t stand the Machine and the way Root worships on her knees to a God unseen, but she owes a current of electricity her life.

She owes a robot her life; she owes a life her life.

The guard beside her gets a phone call. He sends her a look. It’s dodgy, the way his eyes fleetingly gloss over her being, over her unbound hands, and Shaw knows he’s received bad news.

He pulls over. The guard in the backseat, the one who’d originally complained because she got shotgun privileges over him, he tells her that she needs to give him her wrists.

“For precautions,” he explains, and he sounds like he regrets it.

Let’s just say she’s familiar with the feeling.

While Shaw has a list of regrets, making friends with Martine was not one of them, because when they tell her Martine is dead, all Shaw does is sit in the back of the SUV and stare out at the snowflakes falling. She imagines them catching in her hair, settling on her fingertips. It’s been so long since she’s felt the burn of whiskey in her throat, but right now, she’d settle for water.

Shaw’s lost friends before and she thinks she knows how to feel. Anger should come in waves, like when Cole slipped away in the dead of night as gunshots rang from enemy (former alliances) barrels, and Shaw should crave revenge. Rage and Shaw should need for the pull of the trigger in her bare hands, to kill someone of her own because her friend is dead. The friend who’d left her open and tore out her secrets after just a month.

She hadn’t lost count.

Neither had Martine.

But when they tell her it was Root. Root, who snapped her neck, Shaw smiles at her own reflection in the window and doesn’t think of snowflakes.

Instead, she thinks of brown hair and brown eyes and hands that have caressed and hands that have held a taser to leave scars longer than the broken bones by Martine’s own hand. Those hands have spent time around Shaw’s neck and time around Martine’s jaw, but only the latter was lethal. Fingers that have most likely never been broken. Fingers that once tore at the zipper of a hoodie and belonged to Veronica Sinclair.

Shaw presses her lips into a tight line.

Sometimes, the memory of a touch is better than the actual thing.

  
  
  



End file.
